Distinguished, Software Engineer

Role summary: The Distinguished Software Engineer is the senior-most technical leader for Walmart International Search & Personalization, accountable for the architecture, technical strategy, and engineering bar of the discovery platforms that serve customers across Canada, Mexico, Chile, and other global markets. This role defines the multi-year technical vision for AI-native search and personalization, spanning data pipelines, retrieval, ranking, recommendations, and generative and agentic experiences, and ensures these systems scale reliably across markets, languages, and catalogs.

Operating as a force multiplier, the Distinguished Engineer shapes the direction of Principal engineers and engineering leaders, resolves the hardest cross-cutting architectural problems, and represents international discovery in enterprise technical forums across Walmart Global Tech. The role combines deep hands‑on technical judgment with business acumen, translating customer and market outcomes into durable platform investments. This leader embodies Walmart’s values of respect, integrity, and continuous learning while raising the technical ambition of the entire organization.

About the team: Walmart International Search & Personalization builds the intelligent discovery experiences that help millions of customers find, compare, and engage with products across global markets. The organization spans ML Engineering, Data Science, Data Operations, and Platform Engineering, owning the full discovery ecosystem: signal and catalog data pipelines, feature and dataset delivery, query understanding, semantic and hybrid retrieval, learning to rank, multi-tenant recommendations, personalization, experimentation, and scalable ML/AI infrastructure.

Our platforms are designed to be multi‑market by default, supporting diverse languages, assortments, and customer behaviors from a shared foundation. Engineers here tackle hard problems in distributed systems, large‑scale machine learning, and generative AI, and the team is moving decisively toward AI-native, agentic discovery. We value technical depth, data-driven decisions, rigorous experimentation, and the collaboration required to turn research-grade ideas into production systems that measurably improve customer engagement and business outcomes.

• Define and own the multi-year technical strategy and reference architecture for International Search & Personalization, aligning data, ML, and platform investments to business and customer outcomes across markets.
• Architect the next generation of AI-native discovery, including LLM-powered query understanding, semantic and hybrid retrieval, generative and agentic shopping experiences, and real-time personalization, balancing quality, latency, and cost at global scale.
• Set the architectural direction for multi-tenant, multi-market platforms so new markets, languages, and use cases launch on shared foundations rather than bespoke builds.
• Establish organization-wide engineering standards for system design, ML lifecycle and MLOps, data quality and lineage, model evaluation, responsible AI, observability, and resilience, and hold the bar through architecture and design reviews.
• Lead resolution of the most complex cross-cutting technical challenges, including critical incidents, performance and cost bottlenecks, and platform modernization, driving root cause to systemic fixes.
• Mentor and grow Principal and Senior engineers, building a deep technical leadership bench and a culture of craftsmanship, experimentation, and continuous learning.
• Partner with engineering, product, data science, and business leaders to shape roadmaps, frame build versus buy and platform versus product decisions…